Void Stalker (21 page)

‘Vel jaesha lai,’
she replied.

An hour later,
she was making her way through the
Echo
’s
tunnels at the head of her attendants, loosely clustered behind her in a ragged pack. The screams were omnipresent now, echoing through the air and travelling through the walls with the same insistence as a natural wind.

The excruciation chambers were several decks down, and hardly a short walk. In terms of territory on board the warship, she knew they were deeper in more dangerous sectors, where the crew weren’t as valuable, and life was accordingly cheaper.

‘We come with mistress,’ one of her attendants had said.

‘We’ll all come,’ Vularai amended, resting her hand on the prized Legion sword she wore at her hip.

‘Whatever you wish,’ Octavia had said, though she was secretly glad of their devotion.

A pack of equally ragged deck-dwellers fled before her group – the third to run rather tha
n
remain. Several had watched her pass, hissing in Gothic, Nostraman, and languages she couldn’t even guess let alone comprehend. One pack had challenged her advance, demanding their tradable possessions.

‘My name is Octavia,’ she’d told the grimy leader with the laspistol.

‘That means exactly nothing to me, girl.’

‘It means I’m the ship’s Navigator
.
’
S
he’d forced a smile.

‘That means as much to me as your name does.’

Octavia had taken a breath, glancing at Vularai. Most of humanity, in all its huddled, unenlightened masses, m
ight
be essentially blind to the existence of Navigators, but she had no desire to explain her heritage – or worse, demonstrate it – here.

That’s when he made his mistake. The pistol held loosely in his hand was a concern, but hardly a threat. When he waved it in her direction, however, her attendants stiffened. Their whispers overlapped into a serpentine layer of ‘Mistress, mistress, mistress…’

The gang leader didn’t conceal his unease as well as he’d hoped. He was outnumbered, and as he learned from the solid
-
slug shotguns being pulled from filthy robes, he was outgunned as well. The iron bars and chains carried by most of his kindred suddenly seemed less impressive.

‘You’re not deck vermin,’ he said. ‘I see that now, all right? I didn’t know.’

‘Now you do,’ Vularai rested the oversized gladius on her shoulder, where its edge caught what little light existed.

‘Just leave,’ Octavia told him. Her hand strayed to her stomach without conscious thought. ‘There’s already enough death on this ship.’

Although her attendants moved on in peace, their blood was up now. They didn’t bother hiding their weapons as they walked on, deeper into the ship.

No one challenged them again.

She found Talos
in one of the excruciation chambers, just as she’d expected.

Before entering, she’d placed her hand on the sealed door, ready to go in.

‘Stop looking at me like that,’ she chided Vularai. ‘Navigators keep a hundred secrets, Vularai. Whatever waits behind these doors is nothing compared to the secrets kept in the sublevels of the Navis Nobilite’s spires.’

‘As you say, mistress.’

The door opened on grinding hydraulics. She saw Talos for less than a second, and then she saw nothing at all. The smell that struck her was strong enough to have an obscene physicality – it quite literally hammered against her the moment the bulkhead rolled open. Her eyes squeezed closed, stinging like salt in an open wound. The reek seeped into the soft tissue of her eyes, choked her throat, cramped her lungs, and lashed at her skin with a disgusting, damp warmth. Even her sworn curse was a mistake, for the moment the air hit her tongue, the stench became a taste as well.

Octavia collapsed to her hands and knees, throwing up onto the deck. She had to get out of the room, but her eyes wouldn’t open, and she couldn’t catch her breath between her spasming lungs and rebelling stomach.

Talos watched this spectacle from his place by the surgery table. His attention remained rapt as she vomited a second time.

‘I am given to understand,’ he said, ‘that it is common for females in your… condition… to regurgitate as part of the natural process.’

‘It’s not that,’ she breathed, before her guts clenched again, forcing her to heave out another tide of thin, sour gruel.

‘I have almost no experience with such things,’ he admitted. ‘We studied little of the human condition in regards to gestation of children.’

‘It’s not that,’
she wheezed. Inhuman fool, he had no idea. Several of her attendants were similarly struck down, gagging and choking on what they could see and smell.

She crawled from the chamber, half-dragged by Vularai and one other. Only when they had her outside did she manage to rise to her feet, catching her breath as her eyes watered.

‘Seal the door…’ she panted.

‘Mistress?’ one of her attendants asked, confused. ‘I thought you wished to come here?’

‘Close the door!’
she hissed, feeling her stomach heave again. Three of the other attendants still hadn’t recovered either, but they’d made it out of the room.

Vularai was the one to obey. The bulkhead leading into the excruciation chamber rumbled closed. Despite the mask of bandages, she was gagging and choking herself, barely able to speak.

‘Those people on the tables,’ she said. ‘How are they still alive?’

Octavia spat the last of the bile from her lips, and reached back to re-tie her ponytail.

‘Someone get me a rebreather. I’m going back in.’

‘We have to
talk,’ she said to him.

The body on the surgery table moaned, too breathless and ruined to scream anymore. So little of it remained that Octavia could no longer determine its gender.

Talos looked over at her. The blades in his hands were wet and red. Four bodies, skinned and dripping, hung from dirty chains around the central table. He saw her eyes flicker to the hanging bodies, and explained their presence in a voice of inhuman calm.

‘They are still alive. Their pain bleeds into this one’s mind.’ The Night Lord stroked the bloody knife along the prisoner’s flayed face. ‘It ripens now, swollen with agony. They no longer beg for death with their throats, tongues and lungs… but I can hear their whispers stroking inside my skull. Not long now. We are so very close to the end. What did you want to speak of, Navigator?’

Octavia took a breath through the rebreather mask over her mouth and nose. ‘I want the truth from you.’

Talos watched her again, while the bodies drip, drip, dripped.

‘I have never lied to you, Octavia.’

‘I’ll never understand how you can make a credible attempt at sounding virtuous while standing in an abattoir, Talos.’ She wiped her eyes; the sick heat bleeding from the ruptured bodies was making them water.

‘I am what I am,’ he replied. ‘You are distracting me, so I would ask you to make this quick.’

‘And the manners of a nobleman,’ she said softly, trying not to look at the butchery hanging on display. Blood trickled into a gutter grille beneath the table. She didn’t want to guess where it led. She suspected something, somewhere down there on a lower deck, was feeding.

‘Octavia…’ he warned.

‘I need to know something,’ she said. ‘I need to know the truth about all of this.’

‘I have told you the truth, including what I expect from you.’

‘No. You got it into your head that we had to come here. Now there’s this… carnage. You know more than you’re telling us. You know if the Imperium comes to answer these atrocities, it will come in force.’

He nodded. ‘That seems likely.’

‘And we may not escape.’

‘That also seems likely.’

Octavia’s rebreather clicked at the zenith of each slow breath. ‘You are doing what he did, aren’t you? Your primarch died to prove a point.’

‘I do not plan to die here, Terran.’

‘No? You don’t
plan
to die here? Your plans aren’t worth a damn, Talos. They never are.’

‘The raid on Ganges Station seemed to go well enough,’ he pointed out. ‘And we sent the Salamanders running at Vykon Point.’

His amusement only fuelled her temper. ‘You’re supposed to be our leader. You command thousands of souls, not just your handful of warriors.’

He growled a laugh. ‘Throne in flames, do you truly think I care about every single creature that draws breath on this ship? Are you mad, girl? I am a
l
egionary of the Eighth. Nothing more, nothing less.’

‘You could have killed Septimus.’

‘And I will, if he defies me again. The moment his usefulness is outweighed by his defiance, he dies skinless and eyeless on this very table.’

‘You’re lying. You’re evil, heart and soul, but you’re not the monster you pretend to be.’

‘And you are trying my patience, Terran. Get out of my presence before I lose the last vestiges of my tolerance for your irritating ethical theatrics.’

But she was going nowhere. Octavia took another calming breath, trying to control her stubborn anger.

‘Talos, you are going to kill all of us unless you’re careful. What if the Imperium’s answer isn’t some ship of salvation to carry the survivors away to tell some awful story, but a vast Navy battlefleet? It’ll likely be both. We’re as good as dead if they find us nearby.’ She gestured to the quivering wretch on the table. ‘You want to poison the warp with their pain and annihilate any hope of safe flight through the Sea of Souls, but it will be as much of a struggle for me. I cannot guide us through broken tides.’

Talos said nothing for several seconds. ‘I know,’ he finally replied.

‘And yet you’re going through with this?’

‘This is one of the precious few times since the Great Betrayal that my brothers and I have felt like the sons of our father again. No longer raiding, no longer merely surviving – we are once more doing what we were born to do. It is worth the risk.’

‘Half of them are just killing for the sake of it.’

‘True. That, also, is the Eighth Legion way. Nostramo was not a wholesome birthworld.’

‘You’re not listening to me.’

‘I listen, but you speak in ignorance. You do not understand us, Octavia. We are not what you think we are, because you have always misunderstood us. You judge us by human morality, as if we have ever been chained to those ideals. Life means something different to the Eighth Legion.’

She closed her eyes for a long moment. ‘I hate this ship. I hate this life. I hate you.’

‘Those are the most intelligent words you have ever said to me.’

‘We’re going to die here,’ she said at last. Her hands bunched into helpless fists.

‘Everyone dies, Octavia. Death is nothing compared to vindication.’

XVII

GAMBITS

Cyrion was alone,
now that his latest victim lay dead.

He sat with his back to the wall, breathing through spit-wet teeth. The gladius in his hand clattered to the stained decking. Shivers still rippled through him; pleasant aftershocks as the man’s death played out again in his mind. Real fear. Real terror. Not the dull haze of pain that was all that remained among the astropaths and their other victims. This had been a vital, strong man with no desire to die. Cyrion had cherished the look in his eyes as the gladius hacked and carved. He’d been scared to the bitter end: a dirty, unwarranted death, replete with begging, deep in the ship’s lower decks.

The Night Lord had needed it – water to a parched man after all the clinical infliction of pain on their captives. The crew member’s final moments, as his weak fingers scratched uselessly at Cyrion’s faceplate, were the final, perfect touch. Such delicious futility. He tasted that desperate fear, its actual tactile sweetness, like nectar on the tongue.

A groan escaped his lips through the tingling rush of chemicals flooding his brain and blood. It was good to be a god’s son, even one with a curse. Even when the gods themselves watched a little too closely.

Someone, somewhere, was saying his name. Cyrion ignored it. He had no mind to return to the higher decks and go back to the surgical carving that needed to be done. That could wait. The flood was beginning to fade now, and with it, the tremor in his fingers.

A strange name, that.
The flood.
He couldn’t recall when he’d first come to know his gift by that name, but it fit well enough. Latent psychic strength wasn’t miraculously rare in the Eighth Legion – or any of the Legions beyond – but his remained a source of quiet pride. Cyrion had never been born psychic,
or
else his touch of the sixth sense was weak enough to go unnoticed by the extensive tests upon Legion indoctrination. It had simply happened over time, during the years they’d spent in the Eye of Terror. His awareness had blossomed, like a flower opening in the light of the sun.

The wordless whispers began at the edge of his hearing, night after night. Soon enough he could make sense from the hissed phrases, stealing a word here or a sentence there. Each of them shared a single strain of familiarity: they were all fearful utterances, unspoken but still audible, pulsing from those he killed.

In the beginning, he’d merely found it amusing. To hear the fearful final words of those he butchered.

‘I do not see why you find this so funny,’ Talos had rebuked him. ‘The Eye is influencing you.’

‘There are those who bear worse curses than I,’ Cyrion pointed out. Talos had let it rest, never mentioning it again. Xarl hadn’t acted with the same restraint. The stronger the gift became, the less inclined Cyrion was to hide it, and the filthier Xarl found his presence.
Corruption,
Xarl had called it. He’d never trusted psykers, no matter the benevolence of the powers they claimed.

‘Cyrion.’

His name brought him back to the present, back to the stink of oily metal walls and newly dead bodies.

‘What is it?’ he voxed back.

‘It’s Malcharion,’ came the response. ‘He… he has awakened.’

‘Is this a hilarious jest?’ Cyrion hauled himself to his feet with a grunt. ‘Deltrian swore there was no progress.’

‘Just get up here. Talos warned you about hunting in the ship’s bowels when we have work to do.’

‘You’re as bad as he is, sometimes. Has the war-sage spoken?’

‘Not exactly.’ Mercutian broke off the contact.

Cyrion started walking, leaving the bodies behind. No one would miss the lower-deck trash that lay in bloody pieces behind him. Hunting in the
Echo
’s
deep levels was a forgivable sin, unlike Uzas’s occasional mad slayings through Blackmarket and the officer decks, butchering the most valuable members of the crew.

‘Hello,’ said a soft, quiet voice from nearby. Too low to be human, but unrecognisable in the vox distortion.

He looked up. There, in the chamber’s iron rafters, one of the Bleeding Eyes crouched with a gargoyle’s patience. Cyrion felt his skin crawl; a rare sensation indeed.

‘Lucoryphus.’

‘Cyrion,’ came the reply. ‘I have been thinking.’

‘And evidently following me.’

The Raptor nodded his sloping helm. ‘Aye. That also. Tell me, little Lord of Smiles, why do you come down here so often to sniff out the excretion-reek of fear?’

‘These are our hunting grounds,’ Cyrion replied. ‘Talos spends long enough down here, himself.’

‘Maybe so.’ The Raptor’s head jerked once, either a flaw in his armour’s systems or the result of warp-flawed genetics. ‘But he kills for release, for pleasure, for the surge of adrenaline stinging in his veins. He was born a killer, therefore he kills. You hunt to sate another appetite. An appetite that has bloomed within you, not one you were born with. I find that interesting. Oh, yes.’

‘You may think whatever you choose.’

The angled, almond-shaped eye lenses showed Cyrion’s reflection in miniature. ‘We have watched you, Cyrion. The Bleeding Eyes see everything. We know your secrets. Yes we do.’

‘I have no secrets to keep, brother.’

‘No?’ Lucoryphus’s laugh was somewhere between a chuckle and a caw. ‘A lie doesn’t become truth simply because you give it voice.’

Cyrion said nothing. He briefly considered reaching for his bolter. His fingers must’ve twitched, for Lucoryphus laughed again.

‘Try it, Cyrion. Just try.’

‘Make your point,’ the warrior said.

Lucoryphus leered. ‘Why must there be a point to a conversation between kindred? Do you assume every soul is as treacherous as you are? The Bleeding Eyes follow Talos because of that oldest axiom: he breeds trouble wherever he walks. The primarch paid attention to him, and that is an interest still fascinating all these centuries later. He has a destiny, one way or another. I wish to witness that destiny. You, however, have the potential to become a nuisance. How long have you fed on human fear?’

Cyrion breathed slowly before answering, suppressing the tempting flood of chemical stimulants from intravenous feeds in his wrists and spine.

‘A long time. Decades. I have never kept track.’

‘A very weak breed of psychic vampirism.’ The Raptor exhaled a thin breath of steam from his vocabulator grille. ‘I am not one to question the gifts of the warp.’

‘Then why question me at all?’

He realised his mistake as soon as the question left his lips. Delaying had cost him the edge of opportunity. From the corridor he’d come
down
, another of the Bleeding Eyes crawled on all fours, blocking the doorway.

‘Cyrion,’ it said, seeming to struggle with speech. ‘Yes-yes.’

‘Vorasha,’ he replied. It was no surprise when another three Raptors crawled out of the tunnel ahead, their sloping daemon-masks watching him with unblinking scrutiny.

‘We question you,’ Lucoryphus rasped, ‘because while I would never speak out against the warp’s changes, I have much less patience for treachery so close to the prophet. Stability is vital now. He is planning something secret, something he has chosen not to share. We all sense it, like… like a static charge in the air. We walk now in the pressure of a storm yet-to-be.’

‘We trust him,’ said one of the other Raptors.

‘We do not trust you,’ finished a third.

Lucoryphus’s voice was ripened by a smile. ‘Stability, Cyrion. Remember that word. Now run along and witness the war-sage’s flawed resurrection. And remember this talk. The Bleeding Eyes see all.’

The Raptors scattered back into the tunnels, worming their way deeper into the ship.

‘That isn’t good,’ Cyrion said to himself in the silent darkness.

He was the
last to arrive, entering the Hall of Reflection almost thirty minutes after the initial summons. The chamber’s usual industry was halted in surreal immobility. None of the servitors went about their business, while dozens of low-tier Mechanicum adepts looked on in relative silence. If they communicated with each other, it was via means that the legionaries couldn’t discern.

Cyrion walked to First Claw, who stood by the circular bulkhead entrance to one of the antechambers. The barrier itself was rolled open, revealing the stasis chamber within. Cyrion felt something at the edge of his hearing, like the threat of thunder on the horizon. He cycled through his helm’s audio receptor modes, picking up the same almost-audible infrasound murmur no matter the frequency.

‘Do you hear that?’ he asked Talos.

The prophet stood with Mercutian and Uzas, saying nothing. Variel and Deltrian conferred in hushed voices by the adept’s central control tables.

‘What’s wrong?’ Cyrion asked.

Talos turned his skulled faceplate to him. ‘We are still not certain.’

‘But Malcharion is awake?’

Talos led him into the stasis chamber. Their boots sent resonant echoes clanging off the iron walls. Malcharion’s sarcophagus remained on its marble plinth, chained in place, supported by hundreds of copper filament wires, power cables and life support tubes. The sarcophagus displayed Malcharion’s triumphant death in exquisite detail: gold, adamantine and bronze worked into a vision of a Night Lord victorious, head tilted back to roar at a starry sky. In one hand, the tail-crested helm of a White Scar khan; in the other, the helmet of an Imperial Fist champion. Last of all, his boot rested on the proud helm of a Blood Angel
s
lord-captain, grinding it into the Terran dirt.

‘The stasis field is down,’ Cyrion pointed out.

‘It is,’ Talos nodded, crossing to one of the secondary consoles ringing the central plinth. His fingers tapped against several plastek keys. As soon as the final key clicked, the chamber burst with a flood of agonised screaming. The cries were organic, human, but with a tinny edge and an undertone of buzzing crackle.

Cyrion winced, it was that loud. His helm took a couple of seconds to filter the sound to tolerable levels. He didn’t need to ask the screams’ origin.

‘What have we done to him?’ he asked. The screaming died as Talos killed the power feed from the sarcophagus to the external speakers.

‘That is what Variel and Deltrian are working on. It seems likely that Malcharion’s wounds at Crythe have left his mind shattered beyond recovery. There is no telling what he would do if we connected him to a Dreadnought chassis. For all we know, he would turn on all of us.’

Cyrion thought over his next words with exceptional care. ‘Brother…’

Talos turned to him. ‘Speak.’

‘I have supported you, haven’t I? You wear the mantle of our commander, but it doesn’t quite fit.’

The prophet nodded. ‘I have no desire to lead anything. I’m hardly keeping it a secret. Can you not see me doing all I can to restore our true captain?’

‘I know, brother. You are the living embodiment of someone in the wrong place at the wrong time. But you are coping. The raid on Tsagualsa was a fine touch, as was sending the Salamanders running at Vykon Point. I don’t care what you’re planning; the others are either content to trust your judgement, or lose themselves in indulgence in the meantime. But this…’

‘I know,’ Talos said. ‘Trust me, I know.’

‘He’s a Legion hero. You will live and die by how you treat him, Talos.’

‘I am not blind to that.’ The prophet ran his hand across the graven image on the surface of the sarcophagus. ‘I told them to let him die after Crythe. He’d earned the respite of oblivion. But Malek – a curse upon him, wherever he is – countermanded my order. And when Deltrian smuggled the coffin aboard, it changed everything. He hadn’t died, after all. Perhaps I was wrong to believe him too melancholy to survive in this shell, since he’d fought for life when he could so easily have died. We could have used his guidance, Cyrion. He should have stood with us again.’

Cyrion gripped his brother’s shoulder guard. ‘Tread with care, Talos. We stand on the edge of everything coming unravelled.’ He looked at the sarcophagus himself for several long moments. ‘What did the Flayer and the tech-adept suggest?’

‘Both of them believe he is ruined beyond recovery. They also both concur that he could still be formidable – if unreliable – in battle. Variel suggested controlling Malcharion with pain injectors and focused excruciators.’ Talos shook his head. ‘Like an animal, collared by unkind masters and trained by beatings.’